Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [93]
Carpenter despaired. It showed in his work, and he was replaced. Streisand backed out of the project, and Faye Dunaway eventually starred. But what Carpenter took from this experience was that keeping control of the final cut was essential. He knew that would only happen outside the studio system. It was not easy to get films finished independently either. So he kept working as a screenwriter, in the process meeting new directors throughout the seventies who gave him ideas. One of the most important influences was the director Bob Clark.
In the early seventies, Clark had made several horror movies in Canada, including Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, a spoof of zombie movies, and Dead of Night, an excellent piece of antiwar agitprop. But his most notable effort was Black Christmas, the first horror movie to truly capitalize on the use of a holiday in the title. It began with a point-of-view shot at night from the killer outside of a peaceful house. Foster’s Release had such a shot from the window of the side of the house. But this was straight on. Fairly new for its time was the casual sexuality and coarseness of the female characters in Black Christmas. As played by a spunky Margot Kidder and Olivia Hussey, these teenagers were sexual, funny, sometimes vulgar, the prototypes for the friends of Laurie Strode in Halloween. Hussey’s character becomes pregnant and decides to have an abortion. Her boyfriend, who wants her to have the child, is a suspect. Of course, the sorority setting allows for male audiences to enjoy the voyeurism of the film, but it’s not too much of a stretch to conclude that the director’s interest is not merely exploitation. “One of my main objectives was to show how sexual girls are, how often they used the f-word, because people simply hadn’t done it yet, they were still doing Beach Blanket Bikini,” Clark said in an interview with Fangoria.
Just like in Foster’s Release and Bava’s Black Sabbath, Clark organized several suspense scenes around crank calls and a buzzing telephone, an idea copied at the end of the seventies in the Carol Kane hit When a Stranger Calls. What really made Black Christmas stand out was the killer, who, despite all expectations to the contrary, the audience never actually sees—except for one shot of his eyes peeking out of the crack in the door to the attic. We know he’s up there and that he occasionally comes downstairs to butcher people, but we never know when.
The movie ends with his identity still unclear. Carpenter liked Black Christmas and he recommended that Warner Brothers hire Clark to direct his script “Prey,” about a killer from Tennessee. Carpenter and Clark scouted out locations, and even started casting before the project collapsed. In the process of working on the script, Carpenter asked Clark if he ever thought of making a sequel to Black Christmas. Clark said no. Carpenter pressed him about the possibility, and Clark, as he said in a few interviews before he died in a car crash in 2007, explained an idea that had occurred to him. “Later on, it turned out the killer had been caught and he had been institutionalized and he escapes,” Clark told him. “It’s Halloween, and he comes back to the sorority. I was going to call it Halloween.”
In The Exorcist and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, two artists challenged each other and developed a movie through struggle and compromise. Halloween was a different kind of collaboration. Carpenter had been sponging up ideas throughout the decade. When he got the chance, he picked the best ones and had very little interference since he was the director, cowriter, and music composer.
Carpenter denies that he borrowed from Black Christmas, but he does concede that the project was not his idea. It was the brainchild of Irwin Yablans, a distributor who worked with Carpenter to produce Assault on Precinct 13. Yablans had quit his marketing job at Paramount a few years earlier, after his brother Frank climbed the company’s career ladder—all the way to president, releasing such movies as Chinatown and